While reading the latest issue of the MIT Technology Review, I came across an article titled “A Postmortem on Design Thinking” by Rebecca Ackermann. The article examines the effectiveness of design thinking and highlights its limitations and challenges, especially during the execution phase.
Design thinking is supposed to empower everyone to be creative and find solutions by empathizing with the user’s needs. However, the article argues that it can lead to unrealistic and ungrounded recommendations.
This got me thinking about my own career and the design projects that have been successful as well as those that haven’t. I’ve come up with a list of qualities that I believe can help set up a design for success:
• The team has a deep understanding of the target consumer for the product or feature.
• The team understands the consumer’s problems, how they are currently solving them, and where the gaps are in their current solutions.
• The team is given opportunities to explore, test, try and learn how proposed solutions resonate with the intended consumer.
• There is visibility and collaboration across partner teams within the organization to share ideas and thoughts while creating concepts, prototypes, etc.
• The organization provides space ensuring that each partner team has the ability to answer questions and test the idea from their own logic. For example, the design and research team testing prototypes with users, the engineering team planning how the product could be built and assessment of the existing the necessary components, the product team understanding the market size and business opportunity, etc.
What am I missing?